Research

2015

Audio-visual mismatch negativity elicited in musicians with different musical practices

An electroencephalography study

Abstract

The present study investigates the inner hearing in musicians during score reading by means of electroencephalography (EEG). Musicians with prior exposure to multiple staff musical score (multiple-staff-musician) and musicians who encounter single staff score (single-staff-musician) were recruited. During the testing, musicians were presented with scores and their audio counterparts in which during the deviant stimuli, one note on the score would not be the same with the audio. The result showed that the multiple-staff-musician elicited deeper mismatch negativity during multiple-staff-condition than single-staff-musician. The latter demonstrated no prominent MMN. Mismatch negativity elicited in multiple-staff-musician revealed that these musicians were attentive to notes on more than one staves.

This experiment investigates listener preferences of arch shaped melodies by presenting listeners with stimuli that consist of a shuffled order of melodic segments that have different contours, and allow them rate on a scale of 1-7 from most suitable to least suitable of 3 questions regarding the stimuli’s beginning, development and ending. In previous studies, musical phrases and melodies tend to exhibit an arch-shaped pitch contour, and global shape of melody was confirmed to contribute to listener’s perceived contour structure and contour similarity. In a study that pertained to affective response, only college students showed affective responses to contour. This study investigated both the modality and melodic contour at the same time. Thus, it would be interesting to see whether melodic contour solely can trigger listeners’ affection. Another goal of this study is to see if listeners, particularly college level students, prefer arch shape melody contour. By testing it, the stimuli that consists of 3 segments b, m and e will be made and each segments is derived from one of the three arch shape melodies. Thus, after shuffling the segments, different contour shape will be formed. The hypothesis of this test is that listeners will prefer the melodies with arch contour from other melodic shapes. The years of musical training, types of training and the main instruments are expected to have no effect on the preference. The result of this study showed that the college level students prefer the arch shape melodic contour. However, the years of training slightly affected the preference, and the type of musical training and the main instruments were not analyzed due to the inconsistency of responses.